Cicadian Rhythms

Outside in the heat, sweating in the shade after civilizing my swamp (the pool is a bit green after a long repose, lookin’ out fuh gatuhs), and listening to the pulse of the Cicadian choral. It's flags and trumpets and signal fires, ridiculously more efficient and rich than what we've used...though it appears we finally caught up (?) this century. An ebb and flow of collective information passing…”haven’t seen your kind in 13 years, how ya been? Good, wanna mate? Maybe, seen any good food? You bet…just fly screaming in any direction till you hit something...and hey, you need a new wardrobe.” High decibel unmanaged perfection. Good times for Entomophagists; nature’s apology for hard scrabble days.

Makes me wonder…we give and get information in strange new ways that seem more insectile every day, e.g. the Internet as a uniform non-discrete medium for everything the tv/phone/newspapers/magazines (conversations intentionally omitted) could ever do. Some folks look askance on the last things, analog and face-to-face; too much television (aka big monitors) or too much phone (chat and email), but get the same set of requirements met through the keyboard and monitor while also substituting safe-harbor social networking for the brutal realities and effort of visitin'. Cro-Magnon looking down and out at Neanderthals? Maybe, but a word to the EEMH's out there...you're next.

What happens when we start to make use of air/water/food for digital information delivery? That seems to be the 2^nd dream (the first is wireless transmission of power, you know, like the sun); to pass information without stone or wood, dance or voice, keyboard or monitor, to instantly add information to the nervous system with no assimilation requirement through the (antiquated?) sensory apparatus we grew up with. Little mechanical and/or organic bugs swimming in a soup of possibility, sharing via micro in the macro...do the 'Information Age' cultural druthers become as passé as pamphlets and radio? Not implausible considering what we know about the nervous system…I think Kim Stanley Robinson and some others have this fictionally figured out (Gibson and the like have a less plausible mean-step mythology, Tofflerian in its naiveté’ to me, more sexy than real): flood the environment with microscopic elements that form information matrices which communicate in near real-time to us and each other, nanobugs that can go right up your nose or down your throat, pass the blood-brain barrier and drop code directly onto the cortex. Helluva lot more complex than that but neurotransmitters are increasingly teaching us the necessary cant, and while we speak like it like a brain-damaged wildling today, we may learn to compose verse and song in the next few generations.

So consider learning and entertainment, news and knowledge all offered quietly, privately to each individual as they navigate the soup-streams of our over-populated ecosystems, quiet whispers of more and better, latest and greatest seductions, waves of popular and necessary rolling across the mass of us, in cicadian rhythm. The ‘do not call list’ is for Luddite holdouts and the irrelevant, the economics should be…well, the same as economics have always been.  You know that death is the result of information failures at the cellular level right? My guess is the channel focused on that 'ol chestnut will be in some rarefied air indeed. S'under discussion already, sign the yearbook.